Months of the Year!

I do believe our first grader is going to be a famous author someday! She has a deep love for picture books, not only reading them, but creating them too! Jorgie complete her umpteenth book at the Monhegan School entitled, "Months of the Year."

We have been working on months and holidays and calendars in first grade this year so it was a perfect topic for a book! I have to say, it is my favorite Jorgie book yet! The illustrations are wonderful!

Putting all the pages in order!

Jorgie and her family getting ready to party-it up on New Years!

Love in February!

A beautiful rainbow for March!

Jorgie's favorite month : April!

Perfect timing for Mother's Day! 

A little rhyme for Father's Day!

My personal favorite page of the book! I love that Maya is sitting at the table!

Jorgie can't wait till August!

I tried to get Jorgie to write about school for the month of September, but she much rather write about apples!

Spooky October!

A nice Thanksgiving scene for November!

Love, love, love this December page! Too cute.

Time to publish!

Kickball preparation...

Yes... it is that time of year... KICKBALL SEASON! 

Monhegan kickball dates back to the prehistoric times on island...  during the spectacular Sarah Caban era! Every May the town "shuts down" for kickball day! One of the best parts of kickball day is KICKBALL t-shirts! The kids fundraise all year to buy t-shirts for everyone who participates in kickball day. The kids get to design the t-shirts and pick out the colors. This year we brought our t-shirts to a whole new level by tie-dyeing them all! THAT IS A LOT OF TIE DYE! The fun part is that we invited the community up to the school to tie-dye their own if they had the time, we also took specific color and pattern requests. Let me just say, we have some talented tie-dyers around these parts! 

And the results were amazing...

Day 1 of tie-dye... we tie-dyed the kids shirts first to learn about our technique!

Quinny doesn't look like he is feeling the tie-dye process... but his shirt came out awesome!

Day 2 of tie-dying... the first bunch of community members came up to tie and dye!

Gabe showing off his mom's shirt!

The back of our shirt, designed by Quinn.

The sleeve of the shirt designed by Jorgie and Arlo! (personally my favorite part of the shirt)

The front of the shirt, designed by the middle schoolers!

First batch of shirts up to dry...

Day three of dying... a good group showed up!

We busted out 30+ shirts that day!

So glad Olivia is back!!!

Our school rocks came in handy for laying our our shirts!

Puppies, babies, and tie-dye... oh my!

So maybe we should have worn gloves!

Everywhere you looked... tie dye!

and more dye!

Yes! I was there too!

And my hands remained dyed for about four days!

More dyed hands.

Even Chris R. showed up for some tie-dye action!

Look at all of those shirts!

The end result!

My dream school house...

Isn't it gorgeous!

Our tie-dye over our garden...

Can't wait to see these shirt running around the ball field!

70 shirts... DONE!

YAY KICKBALL!

More Magnificent Magnets!

In the last week we have really gotten into some super awesome projects in our Electromagnetism unit! We have built an electromagnet, a telegraph, AND soon a buzzer and a simple motor! 

The best part of science is watching the kids work as a team. The kids work in groups for allof  their experiments and watching them help one another and teach each other is always fantastic for a teacher. After our first big experiment we made a lists of positives and negatives when it comes to team work. The kids pointed out how it is hard to be patient when working with teams and it is hard to always explain everything you are doing because you "have all the information up in your head," but they also said that teamwork means you don't have to do as much work as you would if you were working alone and you end up learning a lot more AND you have way more fun! I think this kind of team work (especially in a multi-age classroom) teaches kids skills they will be able to take with them throughout the rest of their schooling and hopefully lives!

For the first experiment, the fourth graders were a team!

The goal was to make an electromagnet!

Looks like it works!

The middle schoolers and Jorgie made up the second team!

I think Jorgie liked her team!

The middle schoolers made great teachers!

Jorgie's turn to use the electromagnet!

Fourth graders working together!

Don't mix those wires!

For the telegraph experiment, Dalton and Arlo made a great team!

Gabe, Quinn, and Jorgie were the other team!

Each team had to build their own telegraph and then connect the two telegraphs together.

They then got to send messages to each other using Morse code! SO COOOOL!

Up next... buzzers and MOTORS!